The Dancing Table and the Bloody Cloth: A Response to “The Career of Cymbeline’s Manacle”
Sullivan, Jr., Garrett A.
Early Modern Culture, No. 1 (2000)
Abstract
The “career” of Prof. Wayne’s title describes the “life history” (ΒΆ3) of the manacle that Posthumus places upon Innogen’s wrist. As a commodity, the manacle’s career might be expected to resemble that of Marx’s famous table, which “evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.” In terms of its use-value, the table remains inert, “an ordinary, sensuous thing.” It is only “in relation to all other commodities” that the table takes on the “mystical character” that leads to its production of “grotesque ideas.” The career of the table begins with these thoughts, commodification here being a process of subjection through which the “ordinary, sensuous thing” is ushered into a kind of consciousness. What grotesque idea does the commodity-form repeatedly think over the course of its career? Presumably, that it can think at all, and that the products of human labor can give shape to social relations when they have been given shape by them. Of course, that the idea is grotesque does not necessarily mean that it is wrong.
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